The present invention herein relates to an apparatus for treating a substrate and a method for discharging a supercritical fluid, and more particularly, to an apparatus for treating a substrate using a supercritical fluid and a method for discharging the supercritical fluid using the same.
Semiconductor devices are manufactured through various processes including a photolithography process for forming circuit patterns on a substrate such as a silicon wafer or the like. When the semiconductor devices are manufactured, various foreign substances such as particles, organic contaminants, metal impurities, and the like may be generated. The foreign substances may cause substrate defects to directly exert a bad influence on yield of semiconductor devices. Thus, a cleaning process for removing the foreign substances may be essentially involved in a semiconductor manufacturing process.
Generally, in a typical cleaning process, foreign substances remaining on a substrate are removed using detergent and then the substrate is cleaned using deionized water (DI-water) to dry the cleaned substrate using isopropyl alcohol (IPA). However, the drying process may have low efficiency in a case where a semiconductor device has fine circuit patterns. In addition, since damage of the circuit patterns, i.e., pattern collapse frequently occurs during the drying process, the drying process is unsuitable for a semiconductor device having a line width of about 30 nm or less.
Thus, to solve the above-described limitation, studies about technologies for drying a substrate using a supercritical fluid are actively being carried out.